A Classic Jazz Documentary That Honors and Insults the Art Form

Dinah Washington performs at the Newport Jazz Festival, captured in the documentary “Jazz on a Summer’s Day.”

Photograph Courtesy New Yorker Films

With film festivals, curation is only half the battle; the other half is for the viewer to pick the right films. Even generally mediocre festivals usually have a few excellent movies, just as even superbly programmed festivals are likely to have some weak offerings. That’s why—since no one can see everything—the artistic impression a festival leaves is greatly dependent upon a viewer making good choices.

This is equally true of music festivals, as I was reminded, recently, by a long-awaited viewing of a movie that’s as much of a classic in its genre as it is a rarity: “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” Bert Stern’s documentary of performances from the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Several of the performances are among the treasures of filmed music; all of them, whatever their musical merit, are filmed with a rare artistry, a rare attention to making images of music that are themselves musical. Yet the film leaves an impression of misprogramming, condescension, and even willful omission, in the interest of producing a particular image of the Newport Festival and, above all, of jazz over all—an image that corresponds with a skewed image of the United States itself.

The trouble starts at the beginning. The music over the credits is recognizably that of the Jimmy Giuffre Trio (featuring the saxophonist Giuffre with the valve-trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and the guitarist Jim Hall), and the band also appears right after the credits—in a nearly three-minute-long shot of Giuffre and Brookmeyer that’s the longest single shot in the entire film. I find their performance redolent of a desiccated academicism, but even an enthusiast would be hard-pressed to name this group as the one worthiest of the most concentrated visual attention.

After a decorative sequence to establish Newport and the festival grounds as venues, another performance—and another problem—follow. The program’s m.c. announces that “Henry Grimes and Roy Haynes remain onstage” to perform with the next musician, Thelonious Monk. But the movie gives no hint of why the bassist Grimes and the drummer Haynes were onstage ahead of him: namely, because they had just finished performing with the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, of whom there isn’t a trace in the movie. As for Monk’s performance (of his own tune, “Blue Monk”), it’s a relatively quiet one—and yet Stern and the editor, Aram Avakian, can’t bring themselves to show too much of it. The film cuts away to America’s Cup sailboat races seconds after Monk starts playing; what’s more, and worse, the soundtrack also features an America’s Cup announcer calling the event and obscuring Monk’s music. Even when the announcer falls silent and the music is heard clearly, the boat races continue onscreen; Monk is seen for just a few intermittent moments of his four-minute performance.

Odd though this seems, it makes perfect sense, given the deep historical connection between jazz and sailboats; it’s a little-known fact that the great innovators of jazz, from Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins and Mary Lou Williams to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and Monk himself, came up with their advanced musical inspirations not at jam sessions in after-hours joints but at the helms of yachts.

Well, maybe not. Which is why, with the water and the boats, Stern artsies the movie and the music up, which he does throughout much of the film. The moderate-minded, bebop-oriented saxophonist Sonny Stitt gets about half a minute of solo time, intercut with boats; the white guitarist in his group, Sal Salvador, solos in the film for nearly two minutes, mostly on camera but also intercut with boats. And it isn’t just the boat races; Stern pays lots of attention to the concerts’ spectators, showing them in their seats, concentrating or exulting, and out of their seats, dancing—but not all the concerts’ spectators get the same measure of attention. Monk’s viewers get filmed, too; Giuffre’s hardly do, and those of Chico Hamilton, the drummer whose jazzified chamber music remains onscreen for extended shots, or Gerry Mulligan, the bluff (and white) baritone saxophonist, aren’t seen too much, either.

It’s all the more troubling because when Stern (who was also one of the three credited “cameramen,” along with Courtney Hafela and Ray Phealan) films performers, he films them musically, creating images that fuse with the performances to overcome the visual weight of mere recording and take on the rhythms, textures, moods, and human relationships of the music itself. Stern’s images have an identity that, through high-contrast lighting and tumultuous compositions that appear to teem with events even when they’re extreme closeups, raises the music to a cinematic experience—whether it’s the joyfully wise and life-worn fervor of Louis Armstrong or the passionate yet humble exaltation of Mahalia Jackson, the hard-forged swing of Dinah Washington or the hearty exuberance of Big Maybelle, or even, amazingly, the funky fury of Chuck Berry (who, doing “Sweet Little Sixteen” with a jazz group that includes the crucially innovative drummer Jo Jones, unfolds the new era of stark energies in an improvised duet with the clarinetist Rudy Rutherford).

One of the film’s odd yet exemplary moments catches Hamilton’s quintet in a rehearsal in a nearby house, performing with a moody, chamber-music-like restraint. It’s followed by a remarkable off-handed moment when the band is gone except for its cellist, Nathan Gershman, sitting shirtless in the July heat and playing, for his own pleasure, the Prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. The deep-toned twilight shadows mesh with the cello’s dark grain to capture Gershman’s lonely sublimation. Here, the editing brings in a new idea, with shots of children in a nearby playground and a lonely seaside wanderer seeming sacralized in the eternal light of Bach’s music—an inner light that soon comes down to earth when Gershman breaks off to light a cigarette and then returns to the Prelude’s exalted and impassioned contrapuntal ending.

What’s missing from “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” is as important as what’s on film. Some of the musicians featured are among the absolute greats, but others—some of whom are featured at length—are far less inspired and far less crucial to the course of jazz. Not coincidentally, of these, most are white. It’s also worth noting a crucial difference in the way that Stern films two singers, Anita O’Day, who’s white and is onscreen, in extreme closeup, for much of her eight-minute sequence, and Dinah Washington, who’s shown for about four minutes—twice, with the camera fixed almost obscenely on the big hip-high bow on the front of her dress.

It’s worth looking at a list of who was on hand at the festival that year. The omission of Rollins is only one of the most grievous. Miles Davis performed with his sextet, which included John Coltrane. Duke Ellington and his big band performed; the pianist Mary Lou Williams performed solo; Max Roach was there with a quintet that included the bright-toned and innovative twenty-year-old trumpeter Booker Little.

Even more, the selection of musicians and, for that matter, of performances by musicians seems calculated to filter out any trace of musical vehemence by black musicians. It appears to breathe a silent sigh of relief at the absence of Charlie Parker (who died in 1955), which allowed the filmmaker—if not the festival itself—to filter jazz into traditional pre-bop popular strains and its popular successors, and to represent its modernist follow-ups as placid and intellectualized introversion. The popular jazz greats featured in the film, whether Armstrong or Washington, are extroverts, turning their musical faces cheerfully or passionately—but nonconfrontationally—toward the audience. The intellectuals (Hamilton and Giuffre) are busy working out their musical equations and can’t be bothered to smile, but they’re not frowning, either. The movie offers no musical shout, thrash, or outburst that isn’t anchored in popular styles and easily ascribed to showmanly exuberance. By contrast, Rollins, Davis, Coltrane, Roach, and Williams could have thrown viewers musically back on their heels.

The sound of modern jazz is also the sound of the civil-rights movement. Earlier in 1958, Rollins and his trio recorded “Freedom Suite”; but whether the musicians personally took part in it or not, the music itself, with its vehemence, its complexity, its dissonance, its sheer volume and speed, and its repudiation of familiar modes of entertainment, embodied the confrontational insistence of a new age of black American life as well as art. In “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” the leading edge of modern jazz was seen as largely placid and largely white—and it just wasn’t so. The film is one of the great documents of the art form, which it both honors and distorts, exalts and diminishes and even, at times, unintentionally insults.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.